February 14, 2005

SMS publishing challenges copyright

My friend Rohit Gupta as written an essay on whether text messaging is protected by any existing copyright law. I'd never thought about that.

During the days that followed the The South-East Asia and Tsunami Blog, on a collective weblog I write for ChiensSansFrontières, we were receiving and publishing SMSes from Sri Lanka and South India. One of them went thus:

[Stay away from the Galle road.Continous looting and violence reproted in Moratuwa.] - Morquendi

This is a message that is less than 160 characters, but the meaning and urgency of this message cannot be ignored – it needs to spread and duplicate on the Internet, it needs to be plagiarised. Such a short text is not protected by any existing copyright law. To understand this, I had to read up some history and these are my subsequent thoughts.... Read on

emily | 9:08 AM | News, Buzz | Add this this entry to your del.icio.us bookmarks. Digg This Technorati search results for this Entry
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2005/02/007114.htm